Share your cool programs!
Ok, this is dumb and shows my age, but my proudest moment was creating a Frogger “clone” on the Apple 2 in BASIC, using ASCII text. It even had music! I taught myself how to program doing that!
Now about 4 decades later, I’m a professional developer, go figure.
I made the first 3D tennis game you could play in a browser.
Such a silly thing, but I’m still proud of my Sudoku Pi game: https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/sudoku-pi/id6467504425?l=en-GB
It’s basically a new finger-friendly UX for Sudoku. The game is also open-source, and an Android build is coming Soon ™.
UX is interesting. Looking forward to the Android build.
How soon is soon?
I’m hoping early 2026, but I’m looking to hire a platform owner for Android, since I don’t use it myself. So it’s 🤞
I wrote a program that scanned object files (compiled from a large C++ project) to see how they were interdependent. It was pretty useful for detecting cycles in the shared libraries that we were compiling from them, but the biggest benefit was it enabled me to very easily rewrite the build system from scratch.
It was surprisingly simple - most ELF parsers can read a file and dump the symbol tables in them. (In this context, a symbol means a defined function, so if a C/C++ source file has
int main()in it, the corresponding.ofile will have amainsymbol in it.) They also include information about which symbols are defined in the.ofile, as well as which symbols it depends on which are undefined. This allows you to figure out a dependency graph, which you can easily visualize using graphviz or use to autogenerate build files for CMake or any other build system you may wish to use.In my case, I wrote this kind of program twice in two separate jobs. Both of them had a very janky build system using custom Makefiles. I used this program to rewrite the build systems in CMake. The graphviz dependency graphs are also just generally helpful to have as project documentation. CMake can do this natively, by the way - here’s the documentation for it: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake.1.html#cmdoption-cmake-graphviz
I wrote a Monte Carlo simulation of an electron microscope lens given an input file with the number, arrangement, and power of lens elements. It would then calculate focal length, aberration coefficients, and display a graphic representation of the range of beam paths.
Not that cool maybe but I once played a lot of Pathfinder (1st edition). I made a website with a detailed database of all the items in Pathfinder with very specific filters and also including a random item generator. You can try it out here:
Back in the day, I got the weird idea that it’d be handy to grab information from the XMMS music player as it was running. So I made an extension that basically dumped the information about the player state as text to a named pipe. A few people wrote scripts for their IRC clients and whatnot to tell others what they were listening.
(Back then, none of the GUI music players really had any kind of RPC capability. Nowadays, you can probably do this stuff easily with D-Bus or whatever.)
One time, late at night, I was just listening to music in bed with headphones, controlling XMMS via infrared remote controller (LIRC). A random cool track came up. I had no idea what it was actually called. I went “wouldn’t it be cool if I could hit a remote button and it’d say what song is currently playing?” …so I got up, got back to the computer, and wrote a script that reads the pipe, takes the artist and song title, and feeds it to Festival TTS, then added that to LIRC configuration.
Working on it as we speak. Hope it will blow all your minds like I think it might.
It’s a novel game architecture that will enable a unique new art-style alongside custom physics to complement that style.
Will share more when I’m ready.
A lot of cool projects on here. I’m not actually a programmer so everything I’ve done is little more than a script. In high school, I taught myself python by solving project euler problems. Many of them involved prime numbers so I got increasingly good at making prime number generators. I was really proud of getting it down to just a couple lines of elegant simplicity.
i read a book about how a cpu+ram work together and decided to simulate it in excel.
wish I kept the file but I was so proud to make a loop or a Fibonacci sequence in excel by simulating a Von Neumann architecture in excel
I made a D&D character creator for 3.5e/Forgotten Realms. Not just PCs but NPCs and encounters based on CR, too.
Idk I haven’t written many but recently I made an integration for my sister’s startup that automated enrolling prospects from companies in an email campaign by sourcing different prospects name fields and LinkedIn accounts and finding their emails. It was good fun, and the user would get a prospecting email with all the details on the company and the role the person worked in at the company along with how long they worked at their company. I was calling it LeadFetch until my sister closed shop and told me my program was her IP. That still pisses me off cause I was gonna merge it to one of the sources we used after she called it quits and left me with no opportunities. She designed none of the back end but had the gall to say it was her app.
Curious but were you paid for it? I’m no lawyer but I can’t imagine that holding up unless she paid you for it. Even then, without an explicit contract, there’s probably a lot of gray area this falls into because you could have just been offering a service that’s utilizing something you made.
I was employed by her for a time for various duties for her startup and she asked me to make this application
Since she “closed shop” is she running around trying to sell the software you made or is it just rotting away because her ego won’t let you try to make something of it?
It has been rotting, I frequently used the APIs to remix into different apps, pulling posts and comments off LinkedIn for her to review and compile strategies based off of popular posts and users. She wanted some of that code so I forwarded my scripts to her to make use of. She isn’t selling my scripts but she then used them for herself. I tried to sell this idea of integrating LinkedIn Leads to one of our partners who is also a budding start up and set up a meeting. Then I told her because I was proud of my work and she bashed my idea and the direction I was taking claiming I stole LeadFetch from her.
Quite the family member you got. At the very least hopefully you’ve gotten your family to shun them or something regardless of their “legal rights”. Drives me nuts seeing “idea people” exploiting the actual effort and talent it takes to implement it.
I recently built a small game engine which takes image files and metadata in TOML format and turns it into a point and click adventure.
Its not perfect, but I had fun making it.
Mines nothing amazing, really, but i find it handy.
I 🏴☠️ movies. The downloads often come with excess files, images, text, sample videos, etc. The only files I want beside the movie file are subtitle files if they came with the download. And the video files often have obnoxiously long file names with coding info in it, the uploader’s name, etc. And sometimes they get nested weirdly.
Most of the time, the file name and nesting is not really a big deal since I use plex and does good at ignoring nesting and it typically matches the title to imdb entries even if the file name is full of garbage. But sometimes it doesn’t match correctly and has to be manually fixed. And I just want my files to be clean, readable, and get rid of the bloat.
So I made a script that walks through my movie libraries, deletes all unneeded files, generates a directory structure dependent on whether or not there are subtitles, and renames the files (and directories) by removing all of the junk words and coding and leaving only the title and release year. Like I said, it’s nothing amazing, but it’s the only utility I ever wrote in it’s entirety for myself that I actually use on the regular.
Feels similar to something i made, although I made it for music where you could feed it spotify playlists and it will find all the music on places like soulseek and recreate the playlist on Plex (unrelated rant: why are all online playlist movers so bad, 20% of my music even if it exists fully labeled on Plex just fails to be detected :/ )
Implementing a probabilistic skiplists.
Because standard linked lists use traversal methods instead of quick memory access like arrays it’s computationally straining to traverse through 1000000 elements. A skiplist skips nodes by adding an additional dimension to the linked and its probabilistic for adding and removing nodes where as the idealized version requires reconstructing the entire list.





